For Black Struggle in Trump’s America

February 5—Things are getting pretty crazy. Trump snatched a foreign president. ICE thugs publicly executed Renee Good and Alex Pretti for “terrorism.” The war drums are beating, the cost of living is crushing...the situation does not look good. The U.S. imperialists seem almost unstoppable and they’re tearing up the liberal world order with a ferocity that is sometimes jarring.

The capitalist ruling class in this country is waging an all-sided assault to maintain world domination. They’re squeezing their enemies and allies abroad and working people here. For decades, the imperialists pretended to care about minorities while they plundered the world. But the veneer of enlightened liberal ideals is no more. “Human rights” imperialism is out and good ole beat-em-over-the-head imperialism is back. The U.S. rulers can no longer afford the song and dance of giving a hug before stabbing you in the back. Now they just stab wildly, appearances be damned.

The oppressed are about to get it way worse than before. Trump celebrated inauguration day by declaring open season on black people with his war on DEI, and he’s unleashed violent terror targeting immigrants. It is undeniable that this round of reaction is rife with racist hatred. Black people know they have a target on their backs, but the black struggle is nonexistent. The right wing is on the rise and all the liberal “allies” bounced.

We need to do something, but we must understand what went wrong in order to do right. We must learn the lessons of past struggles to go forward. In service of this, we relaunch Black History & the Class Struggle.

The main article of this issue, “Liberalism Destroyed the Black Struggle,” explains why we are in such a bad spot. For decades, liberal leaders tied the struggle to the capitalists, who need black oppression to rule. From the civil rights movement to BLM, these leaders constrained the energy of the black masses and led them to defeat. This has only fueled the right and racist backlash.

We desperately need a new strategy. Class collaboration must be rejected and communist politics embraced to finally break the cycle of liberalism and reaction. To go forward, the black struggle must be an integrated working-class fight against the U.S. ruling class that is brutalizing the whole world.

But the misleadership, defeats and disorientation of the past period put us in a miserable situation. The righteous moral browbeating of Democrats presiding over the devastation of the working class repelled workers and drove them sharply to the right. The once massive BLM movement crashed into a dead end when the liberal wing of the ruling class saw that posturing for black lives no longer served their interests. By embracing liberalism, the left widened the gaps between itself, workers and the oppressed. Now faced with changing winds, some “leftists” turn their backs on black oppression to emphasize bland bread-and-butter economic issues while avoiding hot “racial” topics. They’re still mimicking the Democrats, who now try to woo white workers by canceling the “woke” show.

The liberals’ supposed solution to systemic racism has been defeated. The article “DEI: Moral Crusade Ignites Witchhunt—Labor Must Oppose Racist Purges” shows how DEI did little to help black people, but did ignite a racist backlash. Trump’s slashing of DEI launched a racist purge of federal workers and a rollback of civil rights gains. The unions must oppose these attacks to defend themselves from Trump’s union-busting schemes. But the union misleaders confine their “fight” to the bosses’ courts.

The state of the movement against police brutality painfully proves that the liberal strategy is not working. The black community is still plagued by rampant police harassment, violence and murder. It is understandable in racist capitalist America that black people want control over how their communities are policed. But BLM came and went, and nothing changed. So, what now? In the article “How to Get Real Community Control” we take on the strategy of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, one of the few groups still fighting police brutality. Despite some revolutionary rhetoric, they still look to black Democrats to somehow get the police on their side. But for black people to control the cops, the existing state apparatus must be replaced. In the struggle against the cops, we insist that the only acceptable methods are ones that expose the nature of the capitalist state, and politically prepare the masses for when their struggles inevitably come up against it. Impermissible are those methods which lull the masses with illusions that class collaboration can control the capitalists’ killers.

Victims of police brutality and their families desperately seek justice, but only find mazes of red tape. They face bureaucratic obstacles and court delays for years. If a killer cop ever actually goes on trial, the cold-blooded murderer usually gets off anyway. The system is not on our side. We need another way to fight. The article “How to Get Justice” lays out one path of struggle we advocate against the cops. Our Open the Police Archives campaign seeks to rebuild the movement on a class-struggle basis. We seek to mobilize workers to defend victims of cop terror. The core of our campaign is fighting to expose cop crimes and the hypocritical politicians who claim to defend black people but defend state secrecy.

Attacks are ramping up every day. Communists must link the black struggle to the workers movement to strengthen both. The working class has the power and objective interest to end black oppression. The articles in the section “Fighting for Black Liberation in the Unions” show how putting the fight for black liberation at the center of labor’s battles will strengthen the unions. In the ILA, we must fight against segregated locals. In the ILWU, we must fight against the tier system that keeps the workforce divided and black workers at the bottom. In all instances, we must fight against the labor misleaders who enforce the divisions that benefit the bosses.

The article on Los Angeles explains how the ruling class devastated black L.A. and wiped out union jobs in one fell swoop. The left’s disorientation (including our own) in the post-Soviet period meant that there was no revolutionary pole that could build black and brown unity on a class basis amid changing demographics. Instead, the liberals inflamed racial divisions and paved the way for reaction. With L.A. being a battleground in Trump’s war on immigrants, it’s urgent to understand the failures of liberalism on this question.

We believe the articles presented here stand as models for the left, in contrast to the liberal moralizing which has been undeniably unable to undercut the influence of right-wing demagogues on workers and youth. For more on this failure, see “Kirk Still Needs to Be Proved Wrong,” which articulates actual arguments against the racist bigotry we must politically defeat in the workers movement.

The imperialists are turning the screws here to prop up the planet-wide plantation, so black struggle must be against U.S. empire. We include here two pieces concerning South Africa. One is a speech given at the recent annual Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners, hosted by the Partisan Defense Committee. This speech was part of the ICL’s international defense campaign for Julius Malema, leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), who the South African government targeted at the behest of the U.S. imperialists. The other, an article by our comrades of Spartacist/South Africa, puts forward a class-struggle, anti-imperialist, united-front strategy to liberate South Africa, which is counter to the parliamentarist-nationalist strategy of the EFF.

Finally, we must not forget the fighters who came before us, or the lessons embodied in their struggles. Assata Shakur, Black Panther and Black Liberation Army militant, died on September 25 of last year in Cuba, having escaped the murderous vendetta of the U.S. rulers. We include in this issue an appreciation of her fight as well as a transcript of the powerful 1973 communiqué she recorded while in jail.

Today, many young activists are unfamiliar with the racist frame-up of former Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal. He remains behind bars, condemned to “slow-motion death row.” The speech here, given at the aforementioned PDC event, seeks to bring the fight to free Mumia—as well as the lessons of his case—to the new generation.

Standing on the work of Trotskyist and fighter for black freedom, Richard S. Fraser (1913-1988), we see the legacy of slavery and the peculiarities of American capitalist development which inextricably bound the fate of all working people to the fight for black liberation. There will be no socialist revolution without labor fighting for black people, and there will be no black liberation without a working-class fight. A strategy based on this understanding is essential to go forward.

We believe that the pieces presented in this pamphlet provide a program to overcome many of the main obstacles that block the struggle for black liberation and workers’ emancipation today. We offer this contribution to the necessary debate over how to both defend ourselves and push the fight forward in this reactionary period.

For black liberation through socialist revolution!